1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to efficiently managing a large collection of user profiles for matching against a large volume of data. More particularly, the invention concerns a webcasting system which efficiently manages the consumer profiles, matches them to desired data, and efficiently pushes the data to the user.
2. Description of the Related Art
Within the last six months, a new breed of Internet information system called webcasting or "push" systems has attracted enormous attention in the Internet industry. Instead of using a browser to pull information from the Internet, a push system automatically delivers information contents such as news and weather forecast to a user based the user's interest profile. The user's profile is a collection of predicates which identify the type, quantity or quality of information that should be pushed to the user. Because of its tremendous potential for completely changing the shape of the Internet, the battle for leadership has increasingly intensified.
Webcasting technology not only thrives on the Internet, but it can also be effectively applied in corporate intranets to vastly improve business operations and productivity. For example, a sales representative can be constantly alerted with new product information and price updates to better serve his or her customers, or on-line classified ads on apartments for rent can be automatically pushed to corporate employees who are looking for a place to live. Another application of webcasting is that newly issued U.S. patents within designated technology fields can be pushed to the users who are have interests in them.
Currently, information delivered by a webcasting system is typically organized into a hierarchy of content channels. Because of the sheer volume of information in cyberspace, the key to allowing the webcasting technology to realize its full potential is giving users the ability to personalize their information selection and filter out "noise." For example, a user subscribing to the IBM-Almaden-Seminar channel may use a filter to select only those seminars related to database technology. Non-related seminars or "noise" are thereby filtered out. This kind of personalized information content selection is recorded in user profiles and matched against all the information delivered by webcasting.
The common practice in today's Internet information systems is to use traditional database indexing schemes on information contents. User profiles are applied to an information index one at a time. The problem of this approach is that it does not exploit the fact that many of the predicates in user profiles are shared and do not need to be evaluated repeatedly. As a result, current methods do not scale when there is a large number of subscribers because it has to repeatedly evaluate the same predicates.
Cyberspace continues to expand as more and more people gain access to the Internet. This has resulted in exponential increases in user profiles. A critical technical challenge is how to efficiently match a large collection of user profiles against a large volume of information content when a webcasting system is deployed in a corporate intranet or on the Internet with an unlimited number of subscribers. What is needed is an invention that can be used to efficiently match a large collection of user profiles against a large volume of data.